Cameron Montague Taylor

Fantasy Author & Fiction Editor

Archives for February 2021

Morning Pages: Blackberries

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Welcome to Morning Pages — it’s time for a monthly roundup. I hope you’ve got your pencils sharpened and ready to write. Wanna join in on the fun? Read the prompt, set your timer* and get ready to let the words flow. Feel free to post the results of your work in the comments below where we chat about writing and (if the mood strikes us) get a craft discussion going.

If you want critique from other commenters, use #YESTHANKS in your comment. Otherwise, you can tell us about the flash fic and the process you went through to write it. And of course, I’m always open to hear what you think about my excerpts!

*you can write for as long as you want, but most folks choose 15-30 minutes.

Things I learned this month: Being a dyed-in-the-wool perfectionist who struggles when things don’t go right the first time is a *trip* when one is also a writer.

I think perfectionists come in two breeds: procrastinators and tinkerers. I’m the first breed. If something isn’t going well, or if I’m concerned it won’t go well on the first try, I’ll put it off until time ends and the oceans run dry. While it goes without saying that this is a self-destructive habit, it’s also a helluva tough one to try to break. The only ‘hack’ that helps is a hard and fast deadline.

Over time, I’ve gotten better at honoring the deadlines I set for myself the same way I honor external time pressure, but some days it’s more of a struggle than others. I had a lot of those days throughout the past month, none worse than the day I wrote the piece of flash fiction this post is named after. If it weren’t for a very real deadline (I had to write another flash fic the next day!) it’d still sit unfinished on my hard drive.

I could beat myself up about this tendency, I suppose, but I don’t think it’d get me anywhere. Throughout the time I’ve spent as a writer, I’ve had to come to grips with all of my little idiosyncrasies. If needing to game myself into finishing work is one of them, so be it — better to accept this is the way I am and work with it than to fight against my nature.

And ultimately, that’s what a writing process is, isn’t it? Finding a way to produce good work within the boundaries of one’s nature.

The Prompts:

“Your new ring likes to give you questionable advice that only you can hear.”

Mostly about the stock market.

“There was madness in her bloodline.”

Which doesn’t bode well for her subjects.

“Shatter”

What if a heart really could break like glass?

“Secret + Autumn + Ice”

Neveshir from Dark Arm of the Maker visits the shrine of an old friend.

“A rare flower is required to cure a plague. It is deadly if handled carelessly.”

“Deadly Flower“: A brave knight saves her kingdom — but at what price?

“Secret”

A young bride learns something most welcome about her new husband.

“In three days, a planetary alignment will cause the barriers between the planes to become thin.”

Grief doesn’t get lighter; we grow strong enough to carry it.

“Bone + Copper + Vulture”

“Bones“: Beware the mirages in the drylands. They will lead you astray.

“You should not underestimate her. She has exquisite aim.”

An Oceana ‘verse from long after the story ends. Imran’s daughter knows what she’s doing.

“Star + Ink + Rescue”

“Shipbreaker“: A rescue swimmer encounters a man who isn’t worth saving.

“Sin”

I’ve always wanted to write a Zorro-inspired Fantasy.

“Now that you see what I am, do you still love me?”

What if Cinderella’s stepsisters weren’t the monstrous ones?

“Protector + Veil”

When the King has triplets, two become protectors and one becomes a queen.

Picture Prompts

“Don’t Look“: Sirens prey on sailors who acknowledge the beauty of their voices.

A black and white photograph of a nude young man fading into the mist where a grassy field meets a forest.

“Blackberries“: A man remembers a lover from long ago.

“Merfolk“: Arden from the Oceana ‘verse tells a story about a long-forgotten creature.

Get Involved!

Answer the prompts or dive straight in and respond to others’ comments — let’s share our knowledge, our experience, and have a discussion we can all learn from! Don’t want to miss a post? Subscribe to the blog in the sidebar to get notified about new posts.

Questions

  • Do you write well under deadlines?
  • Why or why not?

Worldbuilder’s Disease: Getting Started

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In my first post on worldbuilding, I talked about worldbuilder’s disease: what it is, and why it keeps SFF writers from getting their stories onto the paper. This week, we’ll look at strategies for overcoming worldbuilder’s disease and getting started on our manuscripts.

Help! I’ve built a massive world and have no idea where to start

A missing starting point comes from one of three issues. Either:

  1. We’re draft blocked: we know what story we want to tell, but have no idea how to write chapter one, or
  2. We’re plot blocked: we have 10,000 years of global history and don’t know how to focus on a book-sized idea, or
  3. We’re revision blocked: we know the story, we know where to start, we’ve started writing… but we can’t get past the beginning (one of two reasons: structure or perfectionism.

While 1) and 3) aren’t problems exclusive to worldbuilder’s disease, they crop up often enough I think they’re worth including in the greater discussion. Even if you’ve never struggled with worldbuilder’s disease, you may see yourself in these problems/solutions.

This week, I’ll explore tips for draft-blocked and plot-blocked writers.

Draft-blocked writers

Draft-blocked writers tend to struggle because they don’t know where to start… and therefore assume they’re not ready to get drafting. Instead of putting words on the page (which feels so big! so final!), draft-blocked writers noodle endlessly with worldbuilding details, plot structure, character bios, etc. – anything that delays the inevitable.

The defining feature of a draft-blocked writer is how much about their story they already know. A draft-blocked writer could probably narrate the entirety of their plot off the top of their head. They can tell you all about their characters, their world, the central conflicts in their story… and yet they still don’t have a draft. This isn’t a writer at a loss for where their story goes. They have the beginning, middle, and end (imagined in a whole lotta detail) sitting in their head.

(They’re also the kind of writer who wishes they could download their thoughts onto the page and be done with it – though I suspect we’ve all wished for that superpower at some point!)

Does this sound like you? If so, here are some tips for ripping off the band-aid and forging into that first draft:

  • Give yourself permission to suck.

I’m serious. First drafts are always a little wonky, no matter how much experience you have as a writer. If you’re brand new to the novel-writing thing (or the SFF novel-writing thing), your first draft is going to be wonkier than, say, a career writer who has spent thirty years in the business.

You’ll find writing advice on the internet that goes something like “Don’t worry about your first book, it will suck and you will be ashamed of it.” That’s absolutely not what I’m trying to say.

You can and should be proud of the first book you write.

But even the best writers don’t get it perfect on the first (draft) try. Many of us struggle with beginnings. It’s okay if the dialogue isn’t sparkling. If the setting is a little wibbly. If you feel like you aren’t getting your character voices right.

It’s okay if you start in the wrong place and realize, after writing, that the first scene is boring. It’s okay if you write it out and decide that, actually, you want to switch from first to third person narration (or vice versa).

It’s okay if you write chapter, after chapter, after chapter, thinking ‘wow, this is harder than I thought, and I’m not very good at it’.

Let go of the fear of failure – of the words on paper falling short of the magical world that lives inside your head.

You can fix the words on the page in revisions. You can’t fix a blank page.

Every mistake you make in the drafting process is one you can learn from – and those mistakes will, ultimately, make you a stronger writer so long as you do the work needed to fix them.

  • It takes 10,000 hours (or 1,000,000 words, depending on who you ask).

If you’ve taken advice on subject mastery from Malcolm Gladwell or Stephen King, you might have run across either of these two figures. Gladwell champions the 10,000 hours approach (ie: that’s how long it takes to master a discipline). Stephen King believes the first million words of written fiction are practice.

That’s a lot of practice.

Where are you in your writing journey? If the words you’re struggling to squeeze out are the very first you’re putting to paper, take some solace in those numbers. Is the road to mastery a long one? Yes. Can it seem daunting at times? Of course. The upshot, though, is that the book you’re writing is a practice round. It doesn’t have to measure up to published works in your genre. It doesn’t need to be groundbreaking or profound.

It doesn’t need to be perfect.

The clock on that 10,000 hours starts the moment you put those first words to paper. All writers have a long way to go before achieving mastery of their fields, so get started!

Plot-blocked writers

So you’ve built a world with 10,000 years of consecutive, fleshed-out history. Perhaps there’s no single, definitive conflict, but rather, lots of cyclical conflict. That’s very cool – very true to life! I love SFF that serves as both an escape from the real world, and a mirror through which we can explore real-world issues.

But.

These epics can be a beast to plot.

The defining features of a plot-blocked writers are twofold: first, in how much of the world they’ve developed. (If you know the name of every king to sit on a nation’s throne for a 2,000-year dynasty, you might fall into this category.) Second, in how much of the plot they don’t know.

You might be a plot-blocked writer if you stare at all your worldbuilding notes and think ‘But where do I even begin?’ Not just where to start your opening chapter – that concern might not even cross your mind. Plot-blocked writers often don’t know who their protagonist is. Do you focus on the king in the year 523, or the draconic invasion in year 1278?

Do you set the story in Nriian, the elvish forest, or among the coastal mountain dwarves?

The world is your sandbox, and you have no idea what kind of castle you want to build.

You’ve put in a whole lotta hard work into this incredible, rich world. So much work, in fact, that your issue isn’t the lack of possible plot points, but a surfeit of them. That’s an amazing problem to have, even if it might not feel that way right now. Why not reward yourself for all of that hard work by letting yourself play in your sandbox for a little while?

No pressure. Just messing around.

How does one ‘play in the sandbox’ of an epic, multi-generational world?

Flash fiction.

There’s a ton of writing advice championing short fiction (particularly short stories) as a great way to get to know characters, hone voice, and strengthen your plot and setting ideas before forging into the novel itself. I agree with that advice in theory, but want to sharpen it further in practice.

Don’t worry about writing a complete short story. Those can range up to 20k! Instead, focus on short, exploratory writing bursts: aka flash fiction.

The definition of flash fiction varies depending on which source you consult, but for the purpose of this post, let’s say that flash fiction is any story less than 1500 words. When I write flash fiction, especially when I’m doing exploratory writing, I try to use time-based goals instead of wordcount goals.

In other words, I sit down at my computer, set my timer for fifteen minutes, and start typing to see what comes out.

Want to write about an elf in year 214 when the empire was still young? Set your timer and do it. Want to skip next to the orphan farm boy in year 2783 when the apocalypse is nigh? No worries. And of course, if you skip back a thousand years the following morning, that’s fine.

Continuity isn’t an issue. Changing characterization between flash fics is fine. You can alter your history, change names, play with conflicting ideas – anything is fair game in these exploratory shorts. You’re poking at ideas in writing exercises. There’s no such thing as a plot hole, here.

What a relief, right?

Try to set these fics in super-deep POV. Resist the temptation to retell history from an authorial perspective (you already know the history! That won’t teach you anything new). By getting inside different characters’ heads, you can start sniffing out where the interesting stories are. Eventually, you’ll start to see trends emerge – ideas you keep noodling with, time periods you prefer, or characters you return to time and again.

Even the characters, time periods, and setting details you don’t see the relevance of will work their way into your story in surprising ways. Flash fiction is, above all, a brainstorming exercise. Instead of daydreaming by looking out the window, though, we’re daydreaming directly onto the page in short narrative ‘thoughts’. Expressing these thoughts via written word – and having record of them! – will help tremendously when you eventually start the drafting process.

Double bonus? You’ve finally gotten words onto the page, at last! You’ve broken the seal! You’re doing it!

Triple bonus? You’ll have a wealth of short stories to use in newsletters, as promo, or to start a Patreon someday.

If you’d like to try writing flash fiction but need a push to get started, why not join me for my Morning Pages? I write to SFF prompts in the morning several times a week. Sometimes I dip into universes that already exist in my head. Other times, I write whatever idea jumps into my mind. They’ve been a tremendously helpful way to flex my creative muscles and explore different writing styles, skills, and ideas. I’d love to see you there!

Up next week: revision-blocked writers

Come join me next week for part three of my (now four-part, eek) series on worldbuilder’s disease. I’ll break down the problems facing revision-blocked writers and offer solutions for those of us who catch ourselves revising our first four chapters ad infinitum instead of finishing our novels.

As always, if you’re enjoying the content, please consider liking this post or dropping your e-mail in the subscribe box in the side bar so you don’t miss an update.

Worldbuilder’s Disease: Intro

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Many Sci-fi/Fantasy (SFF) writers create their first worlds in childhood. They might spend years crafting epics in their heads before putting pen to paper. (I did it, too.) We build settings, characters, backstories, religions, environments, and systems of governance. Some of us have art, maps, maybe even notebooks full of details. Pinterest boards. Folders on our hard drives filled with inspo.

We know everything about our worlds. Clothing, food, trade systems, how sociopolitical factions conflict with one another. Some of us might have the scaffold for thousands of years of history already constructed. These worlds are real, are alive inside our heads.

…but we don’t have a draft of the novel.

In this three-part blog series on worldbuilder’s disease and its associated elements, I’ll tackle the following topics:

  1. What worldbuilder’s disease is and why getting trapped in the worldbuilding phase is dangerous
  2. Overcoming worldbuilder’s disease and getting our project started
  3. The pitfalls those with worldbuilder’s disease will likely encounter while drafting

I hope this serves as a useful reference for my fellow spec fic writers, whether or not you identify as a member of the worldbuilder’s disease club.

What is worldbuilder’s disease?

The defining characteristic of worldbuilder’s disease lies not in the vividness of the built world, but rather, in the sparseness of the writing. In other words: there isn’t any writing, even though we’ve spent years upon years cooking ideas in our heads.

Or, alternatively, there is writing – but not a complete story. Maybe we’ve started a bunch of different novels but never finished any of them. Maybe we keep rewriting the same opening chapters of one story over, and over, and over again.

Whatever the case may be, we have a head (or notebook) full of ideas and almost no narrative content in functional draft form.

Not all diseases are malignant.

Worldbuilder’s disease isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s nothing wrong with filling notebooks with new languages or alternate universes (Tolkien did it, too). Some worldbuilders are more interested in the building than the storytelling, and that’s fine. If you get joy from making character profiles but never want to craft the narrative itself, that’s cool and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. You don’t have to ‘use’ your world by putting it into a story.

That said, if your ultimate goal is to write a SFF epic someday, worldbuilder’s disease starts to look a little less benign.

Once we’ve spent years worldbuilding without writing, the act of worldbuilding becomes an impediment instead of an aid. This doesn’t apply if the project is backburnered in favor of drafting others, of course. Worldbuilder’s disease becomes a problem only when it prevents us from getting any words onto the page.

At that point, we’re faced not with a fun story-building pastime, but rather, elaborately crafted writer’s block. We trick ourselves into thinking we’re working on our work-in-progress (WIP) by doing everything but the writing itself and put months (years?) into the pre-production phase. In reality, once we’ve spent more than a few weeks on worldbuilding, we’re well past the point of diminishing returns.

Writers with worldbuilder’s disease tend to have one of two drafting roadblocks:

  • “I don’t know how to get started.” (Related: I’m not done fleshing out 10,000 years of history. I just can’t make myself pick up the pen. I’m afraid the reality won’t live up to what’s in my head. I have no idea how to make a story out of a bible’s worth of worldbuilding facts.)
  • “I don’t know where to start.” (Related: How do I fit 10,000 years of history into a single story? I’m not sure which characters to focus on. How the heck do you figure out where to start chapter one after you’ve crafted an entire space opera universe?)

If you have worldbuilder’s disease and are stuck in an inescapable rut, I have a spoonful of motivation to share with you: the same realization that helped me transition from building worlds in my head to putting them down on paper.

We don’t need to spend ten years getting a world down on paper. We don’t need to know everything about our worlds when we start writing.

Most importantly: our readers don’t need to know everything about our worlds, either.

Why?

No one cares about our worlds.

Yes, ouch, I know – believe me, I know.

You may be squinting at the screen and saying ‘No way, Cee. GRRM, Tolkien, etc. built words that people are obsessed with. There are wikis and merch and fanworks to prove it.’

And yes, you’d be right to say so. People are obsessed with the world of the Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, etc. I’m not immune to this obsession. Know what else all of those works have in common?

The authors already wrote the stories. People don’t read Tolkien’s notes for giggles. They read them because they fell in love with the story Tolkien told. Though Tolkien ostensibly wrote LotR to have somewhere to house his nerdy languages and eons of history, he wove all of that worldbuilding into the story via

  • Engaging characters, and
  • A compelling narrative tale.

If he hadn’t, the SFF community wouldn’t have spent years digging through every letter he wrote to trace the history of Middle-Earth.

(If Frodo hadn’t (mostly) cast the ring into the fires of Mount Doom, no one would care about the Dark Lord, his tower, or his ring.)

In other words, the bitter part of the medicine – no one cares about our worlds – is sweetened by this:

No one cares about our worlds until we tie them to plot and character.

Rest assured, it is possible to get readers to love the world we’ve built as much as we do – but the only way to get there is to write the story that goes with it.

When we worldbuild, we come up with some truly amazing, creative ideas. Rainbow wyverns who eat prismatic light and pelt attackers with gold. Desert wyrms who can split apart and multiply in-battle like the world’s most infuriating videogame boss.

Yet those amazing creations aren’t enough on their own. They only matter inasmuch as they have a direct impact upon the characters in our story.

These wyverns and wyrms won’t drive the reader to keep turning pages unless they come into direct conflict with characters the reader cares about. Until a rainbow wyvern lobs a nugget into the protagonist’s head, why should it matter to the reader that they turn light to gold? Until worldbuilding details interact with a character, they exist in a vacuum.

I’m going to distill this idea, because it’s vital to understanding how worldbuilding serves our writing: a setting’s importance to the reader is directly proportional to how much of an impact that setting has upon the characters. The more conflict the setting causes, the more interesting the setting becomes.

In order for our readers to care about the world we spent ten years crafting inside our minds, we have to write a story that takes them through that world, showcasing its most interesting bits through the events of the plot.

Think of the narrative like the tracks on an amusement park ride. The ride itself is meaningless from the outside – a potential experience that has yet to come to pass. The story (or the rail the ride’s car sits on) guides the reader through that world in a fun, engaging way. Readers might not notice every bit of machinery that makes the ride go. They may focus on one bit of the ride and ignore others. But the tracks you’ve built – or the story you craft – is what makes that ride accessible.

Otherwise, they’re standing on the other side of a gate, looking in at an overwhelming amount of information without any compelling reason to slog through any of it.

Worldbuilding isn’t writing

For those of us with worldbuilder’s disease, it’s imperative that we stop thinking about worldbuilding as time spent writing.

(Caveat: those of us who don’t have worldbuilder’s disease may find the opposite helpful. I have a friend who counts all of his worldbuilding words as ‘words written today’ to keep himself from skimping on the planning process.)

Until you have several completed drafts under your belt, counting planning words is a kiss of death. It gives you permission to avoid the difficult work: actually writing your story.

This is hard. Harder for those of us who’ve been worldbuilding for years and consider the worlds in our head a second home. So long as the setting remains intact in our minds, it’s perfect – the exact story we’ve always wanted to read. We can play it through our minds in its entirety – all ten thousand years of it – and don’t have to think about character arcs, killing darlings, or avoiding white-room syndrome.

As soon as our worlds hit the page, they’re beholden to two Big Scary Limitations:

  • The limits of narrative structure, and
  • The limits of our technical skill.

If we want to write our story, we must accept that imperfect words on a page are better than perfect words inside our head. We must let ourselves believe that, even though some of the richness of our world will invariably be lost in translation, we cannot transport anyone else to that world with us unless we make an attempt at translating. And even if the limits of narrative structure demand that we only tell a mere fraction of the full measure of the story in our heads, that mere fraction is more than what currently sits in our blank drafting document.

The first step of curing worldbuilder’s disease is getting started.

Stay tuned for next week’s post when I’ll write about mending our worldbuilding ways and getting words onto paper for the first time (or getting past whatever chapter keeps hanging you up!). Join me again on week three when I break down some of the biggest pitfalls those of us with worldbuilder’s disease encounter as soon as the words start flowing.

And if you’re looking for a way to get something – anything – on paper in the meantime, join me tomorrow (and Saturday, and Sunday, and Tuesday) for Morning Pages: short flash fiction prompts for SFF writers looking to jumpstart creativity and chat about craft.